1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to transportation management including route and/or trip planning that is useful for dispatchers and drivers in the trucking and other transportation industries and, more particularly, to a transportation management system with route (or trip) optimization tools (e.g., hardware and software) for comprehensively planning a route (or trip or trip plan) to effectively utilize available resources such as a particular vehicle and a particular driver, a driverless vehicle, a drone, and the like.
2. Relevant Background
In the trucking and other transportation industries, it is very important to effectively manage the available resources including vehicles (e.g., a truck with its tractor and trailer) and drivers, which may be considered in many cases to be the key resource of a transportation company. Transportation management has been enhanced by recent advances in telematics and associated hardware and software that allows a dispatcher or back office to have ongoing connectivity with each vehicle and driver. Transportation management software, which may include fleet or carrier dispatch software, has been developed that provides shipment planning and execution to assist transportation companies (or “carriers”) in managing and growing their business by giving them visibility to costs and resources and alerting dispatchers to exceptions that otherwise may have grown into large problems. These tools combined with connectivity of the fleet and dispatcher can provide increased fuel economy, less vehicle and/or driver downtime, and higher productivity.
While many advances have been made in trip planning including route optimization, there remains a need for improved methods to maximize the efficient use of drivers as well as other resources such as the carrier's vehicles. Currently, carriers have two main alternatives in performing trip planning. The first alternative is to leave individual trip planning completely up to the driver and to rely on the driver's experience and capabilities for trip planning. However, many drivers are inexperienced or do not have these skills. Failure to plan well leads to drivers paying more for fuel than they should and driving without sufficient driving hours of service per the regulations under which they operate (which is a finable situation that could result in an out-of-service citation and/or late delivery) or parking in unsafe or unplanned locations to avoid driving without sufficient driving hours of service.
The second alternative in trip planning is more commonly used by the larger or more technically savvy carriers. This involves the back office using third party fuel optimization tools to identify the optimal fuel plan for a base route path for the trip that may or may not accurately reflect the optimal route path for the vehicle and load at the time it is meant to be run. The impact of rest stops are then estimated by using flat hour additions for longer routes (e.g., adding ten hours for the daily reset to overnight routes with “ten hours” being a non-limiting example useful for complying with current U.S. Federal Long Haul HOS regulations with it being understood that the present description is useful for complying with any country's current regulations) to provide an educated guess as to whether or not a trip plan is viable. The driver is often messaged a list of optimal fuel stops they should use, but their navigation system has little or no knowledge of the fuel plan without manual driver input, often leading to navigation route paths that do not align with the fuel plan locations. Additionally, the driver is still responsible for figuring out where and when to take their rest stops on their own without optimization or suggestions aligned with their current trip.
As a result, the drivers are presently left without the tools they need to help plan their full trip, which includes every stop and/or activity between the work stops, and dispatchers are left without insight into how required non-work stops affect the overall trip plan viability. Delays or other exceptions to the trip plan only exacerbate these problems, and this results in drivers often having to choose between driving without a plan or adding further delays to their trip while they manually re-plan the remainder of their trip.